Recently, message exchanges using electronic mail, text chat, and the like from an information processing terminal, which is a portable type such as a cellular phone, a tablet terminal, or the like, have become widely popular.
In multiple languages including Japanese, an emoticon culture, which expresses a portion difficult to express by words with an emoticon, is gaining popularity led by young people. Various technologies are presented to improve user-friendliness of inputting the emoticon. A technology has been known to search for the emoticon, which having the same pronunciation as that of characters associated with characters to which inputs are fixed, from an emoticon dictionary section and to display the searched-for emoticon as an input candidate. Another technology has been presented to produce a new emoticon by combining a display (emoticon) of a proclitic phrase with pronunciation of the proclitic phrase (Japanese Katakana in a half width) based on emoticon generation data of the same emotion category as a new phrase being input.